Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communications, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for performing cell on/off operation in a wireless communication system.
Related Art
The 3GPP LTE is a technology for enabling high-speed packet communications. Many schemes have been proposed for the LTE objective including those that aim to reduce user and provider costs, improve service quality, and expand and improve coverage and system capacity. The 3GPP LTE requires reduced cost per bit, increased service availability, flexible use of a frequency band, a simple structure, an open interface, and adequate power consumption of a terminal as an upper-level requirement.
Small cells using low power nodes are considered promising to cope with mobile traffic explosion, especially for hotspot deployments in indoor and outdoor scenarios. A low-power node generally means a node whose transmission power is lower than macro node and base station (BS) classes, for example pico and femto evolved NodeB (eNB) are both applicable. Small cell enhancements for evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access (E-UTRA) and evolved UMTS terrestrial radio access network (E-UTRAN) will focus on additional functionalities for enhanced performance in hotspot areas for indoor and outdoor using low power nodes.
For small cell enhancements, physical layer aspects have been discussed. Specifically in 3GPP LTE rel-12, when a number of small cells are deployed in a macro cell coverage, the feature of small cell on/off has been discussed, in order to reduce interference, which may occur since all small cells are turned on, and to increase user packet throughput (UPT) of a user equipment (UE). To support fast transition between on/off states of the small cell, various technologies have been studied, one of which is a discovery reference signal (DRS).
A method for transmitting the DRS efficiently may be required.